I had a friend send me this recently. My fish related story involves creeping my dad out when I actually caught a fish, and upon failure to receave proper fish killing instruction from my all wise father (I was like 5 or 6 at the time), got a large flat rock and a smaller pointed rock and pounded its skull in. I think he expected me to throw it back, not take it home for dinner.

My childhood fish story…One time I had a suicidal goldfish. Unfortunately, we had no idea of its intentions. Anyway, one night it jumped out of its bowl, which was in my bedroom. I stepped on its cold, dead body barefoot while making my bed. This was almost 40 years ago, but I remember it clearly.

If it makes you feel better, my sister’s pets were always homicidal. We had a fish, that belonged to my older sister, one of those small, see through fish, and not long after any other fish was added, it would be found dead. My little sister had a bird that killed my brother’s bird, and then killed the mirror in the cage. Madness seems to not be genetic, but contagious.

captcha: humorous was, when we found the mirror shattered and the bird alone in the cage.

A friend of mine grew up in the country. Her parents decided to make a little spare cash raising chickens. How difficult could it be? Buy a bunch of (real living) peeps, throw down some feed, and then you have grown chickesn. Well peeps really ARE just as cute as they look on tv. So my friend and her friend were just having a ball with ’em. They’d chase ’em around the yard, they’d pile them in a barrel and watch them bounce out, almost like living soda pop fizz. Then it’s dinner time. They wash up, eat dinner and when they come back and start emptying the barrel, the realize that only the chicks near the top are still alive. The ones on the bottom had asphyxiated, crushed by the press of the chicks on top of them. They knew that they were going to be in BIG trouble for killing 1/3-1/2 of the chicks that her parents bought. So they quitely burried them in a corner of the yard, and her parents eventually figured that a fox must have thinned the flock. She had nightmares of peep peeping chicks out to get her.

My fish story is basically about the last time I went fishing as a kid. My Grampa took me and a couple of cousins fishing and I hooked what I was sure had to be the biggest catfish in the history of the world. It was at least triple the size of the second biggest one I’d ever seen at that time.

I was picturing myself holding it up (with assistance) in the Guiness book. Then we found out it not only wasn’t the biggest catfish in the world. It wasn’t the biggest one pulled out of that lake that summer.

It was a moderately awesome acheivement for a twelve year old. It was over ninety five pounds. But the record that summer was more than ten pounds heavier.

I was pretty bummed. I worked my ass off landing that sucker, and in stead of getting the parade I had alreaddy planned in my head, I got two or three old men saying “Not bad.”